Creative Mac: Tutorial: Revisiting Popup Menus in Fireworks 4

One of the great new features in Macromedia Fireworks 4 is the ability to create interactive menus practically on the fly. When I reviewed Fireworks last week, I touted this feature as one of the best reasons to upgrade from version 3 to version 4. I might have jumped the gun there. It seems there are some problems with the interactive menu feature in Fireworks 4. So let's take a look.

First off, when you're in Fireworks itself, the interactive menu feature is simple and very clean. If you preview it in your browser, it works great. The problem is that when you actually use the menus on a Web page, something nasty happens: The menu positions are written in Fireworks with absolute positions. So, if you move the menus on your page, they pop up in the wrong place. Big problem. In other words, you can't really use these menus. That is, not unless you follow ol' Doc Davey's regimen for fixing up the JavaScript. It's a lot more labor-intensive than you might want it to be, but it is a temporary solution while Macromedia figures out a way to fix it on their end.

We';ll start off by learning how to create the actual menus in Fireworks. Then we'll look at how to use Dreamweaver to bring them into an HTML page and fix up the positioning of the popup elements.

Creating the menus
Creating the menus themselves is a terribly simple process. First, just take an image and create hotspots or slices on the areas of your image you want to trigger the popup menus. For my example, I'm going to use a text-based navigation bar. You can use anything you want.

Now all you have to do is select a slice by clicking on it with the arrow tool and then choose Insert > Pop-up Menu.

You will get a dialog box asking you to fill in a few blanks so that Fireworks can know what to do with your menu. Notice that in my example below, several of the menu items are indented. This indentation turns these items into submenus of the item above them. You can indent again to make sub-submenus, apparently without limit.

If you created your menus out of order, you can just drag them around in this dialog box to position them correctly. If any become indented against your will, just click on the outdent button to return them to a normal state. When you're done filling in the information, click "Next."

All that's left to do is pick your style. You can choose from text or images, with a few different options for each.

Lather, rinse and repeat for each hotspot you created on your original image.; When you're done, you can preview your work directly from Fireworks in your browser to make sure that everything's right.

Of course, as we already know—and contrary to what you see previewed in your browser—everything is not all right. This will become clear when you try to place your new menu into an HTML document.

Now launch Dreamweaver and open up a document or create a new one. Place your insertion point where your menu will actually reside on the final page. Then choose Insert > Interactive Images > Fireworks HTML.

After you do so, you should see your original image. Now preview it in your browser (F12). Where'd the popup menus go? Probably far off to the top of your page. Not very suitable for use. To get this to work properly, you're going to have to do a little tweaking of the JavaScript. Don't worry. This isn't programming. You're just going to change a couple of numbers.

Fixing the JavaScript
If you're in Dreamweaver, open up the HTML page on which the popup menu will finally reside. Insert your Fireworks HTML in there where you want it. Now highlight the table that contains the Fireworks HTML. Now, in Dreamweaver, go to your code view. (You can get there by clicking the little icon that looks like this ( ) in the top left corner of your current HTML document.

Because you highlighted that table in the regular view, your code view will already have your code highlighted. Find the part of the code that says, <a href="#" onMouseOut="FW_startTimeout();" onMouseOver="window.FW_showMenu(window.fw_menu_0,100,10);" >. (Yours will vary from this.) See that little part at the end that reads, menu_0,100,10? The "100" and "10" are the horizontal and vertical positions of the menu relative to the top left corner of your document (100 pixels over and 10 down). All you have to do is change these to match the position of your actual menu. In many cases, this will be simple because you're probably going to have your menu near the top of your page, and the position won't change much from browser to browser. So just enter appropriate values to match the position of your navigation bar. Repeat this process for each of the menus listed in your codes view (menu_1, menu_2, etc.).

If you have your menu buried somewhere in the middle or near the bottom of the page, this will be more of a problem because the position is likely to be dramatically different depending on the viewer's browser, screen resolution, window size, etc.

Changing the way X and Y are calculated: Placing
your menu and the JavaScript call inside a new
table will cause your menus to work correctly
in Microsoft Internet Explorer only.

Frankly, I don't have a fix for this. You could get around it by setting an absolute height for the table that contains the navigation bar, but there could still be problems. Or you could just assume that every one of your viewers is using Internet Explorer, in which case the simple fix is to put the whole thing inside a new table—the navigation bar and the JavaScript call that gets inported with it. If I discover the fix before Macromedia does, I'll let you know. But right now, you're going to have to live with popup menus that only work properly near the top of a page.

At any rate, this problem forces me to revise my recommendation about upgrading to Fireworks 4 until it's resolved. Hold off until there's a fix for this. There's no reason to go headlong into buying software that's not ready for professional use.